As one method for inspecting and observing a biological sample extracted from a human body, a laboratory animal, or the like, a method is known in which a thin section is prepared from an embedding block in which the biological sample is embedded by an embedding agent, dye processing is performed on the thin section, and thus, the biological sample is observed.
In the related art, an operation of preparing the thin section is performed manually by an experienced operator using a sharp and thin cutting blade. However, in recent years, an automatic thin-cutting device capable of automatically performing the operation of preparing the thin section has begun to be provided. According to this automatic thin-cutting device, it is possible to continuously prepare the thin section without imposing a burden on the operator (refer to Patent Document 1).
Moreover, a thin section sample is prepared by fixing the prepared thin section to a substrate such as a slide glass. In addition, an operator performs pathological inspection or the like while performing dye processing or the like on the thin section in the thin section sample.
However, regardless of the manual preparation method or the automatic preparation method of the thin section, generally, the operator views and compares the thin section in the thin section sample and the embedding block which is the origin of the thin section, and visually performs collation whether or not the thin section is thinly cut from the embedding block, based on the shapes or the like of the thin section and the embedding block. In this case, in order to prevent specimen mix-up, the operator carefully performs the collation operation.
Here, as the automatic thin-cutting device, a device is known which reads ID data printed on a cassette to which an embedding block is fixed and prints the ID data on a slide glass in the thin-section sample (refer to FIG. 2). The operator can easily perform the collation using this device.